


Life After the Pain

by Ellisper



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Background Relationships, Captain America Sam Wilson, Depressed Nebula, F/F, Heavy Angst, I'll tag them here because they're not the focus, Like, Mantis probably won't turn up for a while, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, References to Depression, tw: depression, tw: suicide attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 16:41:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17707904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellisper/pseuds/Ellisper
Summary: Her vengeance had been served. Thanos was dead, killed by her own and the Avengers’ hands. She had used the gauntlet, his own weapon against him and exacted her revenge, watching the mad titan crumble into dust at her feet. She should feel better than this, released by the pain that he’d built into her body with every robotic part and enhancement.She didn’t. She still hurt.***AKA me needing to give Nebula a happy ending





	Life After the Pain

Nebula sat, hugging her knees in bed, half covered by the blanket. She hadn’t slept, nightmares burgeoning at the edge of her sanity ever since coming to Earth. Normally she was able to keep the emotions inside her, had learned to keep them in check. Vengeance was too important to let a mental breakdown get in the way.

But her vengeance had been served. Thanos was dead, killed by her own and the Avengers’ hands. She had used the gauntlet, his own weapon against him and exacted her revenge, watching the mad titan crumble into dust at her feet. She should feel better than this, released by the pain that he’d built into her body with every robotic part and enhancement.

She didn’t. She still hurt, but in a different way.

Her confinement to the Avengers compound was just another annoyance. It made sense, she was dangerous. So were a lot of the people in here. The place narrowly avoided feeling like a prison, if only for the privacy they allowed her and the freedom to roam the building.

However, Nebula barely left her room. It had been almost three weeks since her confinement and she’d only been as far as Stark’s workshop and the canteen.

Something beeped on the table beside the bed. A message on the communicator Stark had given her on Titan when they’d teamed up to get back to Thanos. It was cracked and half the casing had come off but, almost miraculously, it still worked. Nebula guessed it was a testament to Stark’s intelligence and engineering.

_come down to workshop got something to show u_

Nebula got up and pushed the communicator into a pocket in her jeans (not hers, they apparently belonged to “ _Wanda_ ”, the name sewn into the inner waistband) and made to leave the room. The lights in the corridor flickered on at the movement and her eyes ticked and whirred to adjust to the sudden change as she left the room, blanket scrunched on the bed and pillows thrown against the wall.

\---

She approached the workshop, lingering darkly in the doorway. As he had done so many nights since returning, Stark had pulled an all-nighter, working on new designs fueled only by coffee and guilt. The mugs occupied almost every available surface and the smell of caffeine permeated the air. Stark himself looked pretty ragged, dark circles ringing his eyes and hair hanging limply over his forehead.

Nebula’s attention, however, was held by what Stark had created. Four prostheses, two arms and two legs in varying states of completion, were laid on the table. The outside was blue, matching her own skin tone, but in places she could see the silver interior, complex wires splitting off and connecting a central axle to the outside plates. Obviously imitating organic arms, they appeared simplistic in design. Nebula blinked, black eyes swirling in quiet disbelief before entering further.

“You like them?” Stark asked. He sounded hoarse, the many sleepless nights catching up to him. Nebula didn’t answer, only stared spellbound which he must have took as an answer on its own. “I noticed how inconvenient yours are and I had nothing better to do so…” he trailed off, waiting for a concrete response from her. Nebula assumed that Stark had learned to read her emotions in the time they’d been stranded together and, while neither of them would consider the other a friend, they’d become close enough to be able to recognise certain emotions in each other.

Nebula nodded in response, running her own hands over the left arm. The material gave a little under her fingers, like skin and Nebula wondered if it could mimic feeling too. She couldn’t feel, that would have slowed her down, but in her more lonely moments, she had tried to remember what her own body felt like before it was mutilated, turned into a weapon and set upon her sister again and again and again. Only wispy remnants of those memories remained, only adding to the rage that had once fueled her vengeance.

“Would you like to try them on?” Stark asked hesitantly. Nebula nodded again, brushing away her thoughts and sitting on the table beside the prostheses. Stark himself stood up and started to go through the familiar motions of removing her own cybernetic parts. Nebula sat very still, as she had learned to do every time she’d been .. upgraded and, more recently, repaired by the mechanic. They played their familiar roles only this time, Nebula’s limbs would be completely designed by Stark, rather than simply modified to be more efficient.

“What modifications do these ones have?” Nebula asked, not taking her eyes off the floor as her left arm came off. Stark blinked and replied “Well, you should be able to move more smoothly and the bearings won’t take in as much gristle as your old ones.” He hesitated again before saying “These aren’t meant to be weapons. They’re just meant to be you.” He carried on talking, explaining how the joints worked, how he’d had to ask his wizard friend to help with the nerve connections and a wakandan supergenius to solve some of the individual system integration issues and so forth but Nebula stopped listening. Fighting had been her life ever since she could remember and she’d made a lot of enemies in that time. If she couldn’t use these prosthetics to defend herself, she may walk out of such confrontations in pieces.

“Do you think that wise, considering my history?” she asked.

“Actually I do, especially considering your history,” Stark smirked, “Plus there’s less chance that you’ll kill me in my sleep this way too,” he added, half jokingly.

Nebula grunted, glowering dangerously at him. She wasn’t a ray of sunshine like Spider-Man but being half expected to murder an ally was pretty extreme, even for her.

“I’m sorry, that was uncalled for,” Stark apologised, reading Nebula’s mood. He worked in silence, connecting wires and bolts across the different tech while Nebula herself sat motionless, barely breathing. She almost looked like one of Stark’s creations, unfinished, awaiting the final adjustments.

Finally Stark was finished, moving away from her so she could move freely. She straightened up and shifted off the workbench to test her new legs. Surprisingly, she could use them almost as well as her old parts, despite only having them for a minute at best. She crouched, poised for a leap and jumped 10 feet in the air. “I thought you said they weren’t weapons,” she said in an accusational manner, silently thanking whoever designed the room with a high ceiling.

“They’re not, they’re you,” Stark replied, “I know you hate to be grounded so this was the closest I could get to allowing you to fly.” Nebula scowled at him; she didn’t need reminding that she was essentially on “house arrest” (a weird human term) since she was technically a war criminal wanted throughout several planet systems.

She flexed her arms, testing the range of movement before clenching her fists and punching the table. When she lifted her arm, there was a dent in the metal. “Not a weapon,” she repeated sarcastically.

“High tech prosthesis,” Stark corrected.

“Like your armour,” Nebula asked sharply.

“Exactly!”

“Which, almost single-handedly, took down Thanos.”

“Okay, but you get what I mean. Besides, I know you’d wear them out very easily, I’ve seen you training.”

Nebula nodded, dropping the conversation there. That was normal for a lot of their conversations: short and sarcastic.

Before she was able to refit her old prosthetics, Tony stopped her. “They’re pretty much finished anyway, I only really need to fit the coverings,” he explained. Nebula lowered her arms and murmured a quiet tone of thanks. “And yes, you can leave now, that's all I wanted you for,” Tony added.

She didn’t need to be told twice. Nebula walked briskly to the door, trying to decide whether to go to the training room to test out her new limbs or back to her room to be alone. Rounding the corner, she saw the new Captain through the glass doors, practicing with both wings and a shield.

Her room it is.

She called for the elevator, ignoring Stark’s AI announcing its arrival. She wasn’t fond of the disembodied voice, didn't like being watched. She was glad he'd muted FRIDAY in her room and disabled the cameras. She wasn’t exactly comfortable in the compound but the privacy was nice and the people were tolerable most of the time.

The elevator doors opened to show Natasha, another one of Stark’s friends. She gave a nod of acknowledgement and left Nebula alone. That was something she liked about the Black Widow; she seemed to understand her more than anyone else in the compound.

They rode the elevator up to Natasha's floor, where she got off without a word, and Nebula stayed until her floor, the top one. She went straight to her room, barely looking at anything else, until she got to her door and unlocked it with her keycard.

She kept the windows blacked out. They hadn't been anything else since Tony told Nebula she could do that. The lights were never on full power, rarely ever even got to 50%. The room was gloomy, there wasn't much other way to say it. In a bout of rage, Nebula had knocked off the ornaments from the dresser. They lay shattered on the floor. Bedsheets had been ripped and pillows punched and hurled around the room. Only the blanket remained on the bed, scrunched against the wall. 

Nebula collapsed on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Where did she go now that she had nothing to be angry at anymore? Thanos was dead and dusted, there was nothing left for her after that. In her head, she'd never imagined anything after that, or if she did, her mind would settle on morbid images of her body floating lifeless in space. The truth was, that was meant to be the end of her story. She couldn’t help but feel cheated out of her true end.

Something ran down her cheek, pooling in the folds of her ear. She wiped it away, frowning. Sleep would be better, at least she could stop existing for a few hours and escape the emotions she'd pushed down for so long.

As her eyes closed, Nebula’s last thought was of her father, grinning in that mad way of his, as he tore her apart over and over and over again.


End file.
